WHY TRAIN IN PHYSICAL THEATRE IN AN ENSEMBLE SETTING?

 A long time ago, I used to make up plays and adapt story ideas with the neighborhood kids. I would entice them with promises of glory, and then put them through endless rehearsals in my large cellar which my family had given over to me as a creative space! At that young age, I had no theatre training, and whatever story we chose to shape and share seemed true enough to me. I was passionate about these meaningful moments shared with wonderful friends creating together- for me serious play.

Sometime later, I went to college and chose to study theatre. My training started with the Stanislavsky Method, as so often happens in this country. I codified what I learned into a strict set of rules, thus providing myself with a solid set of ideas as to what was right and what was wrong-what was good and what was bad- in theatre work. I fancied that I was becoming more discerning, but I grew to dislike almost everything. This was a problem. For a while, I enjoyed being able to analyze the work I saw from a specific point of view, I missed the risk-taking and the trust in my own ideas-my own inspiration. How would the two ever merge?

While I was engaged in that questioning, I happened to see work by Andre Gregory and his ensemble’s production of ALICE IN WONDERLAND, also work from Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre, and Kaleel Sakakeeny’s Stage One Theater Lab in Boston’s GERTRUDE of OPHELIA.

Here were plays that defied the definition of “good theatre”. They had schtick, they had style, clarity of moment, and engaging movement…they looked as though they might have been created with a little polish by my friends on a rainy day in my cellar years ago-and they felt honest and true. Of course, the actors in these engaging theatre ensembles in the 1970’s, NYC‘s Manhattan Project and Boston’s Stage One Theatre Lab, had incorporated experimental training in physical acting technique. Their evocation of child’s play was a deception- a deception of simplicity-the best kind in art. Why was their work so enthralling and why was it well beyond what audiences normally conceived of in American theatre in the 1970s?

My conclusion was something was missing in the “actor training” that these ensembles had discovered.

So, I went and studied physicality onstage and ensemble acting with Stage One Theater Lab at the Boston Center for the Arts and worked with the ensemble for a number of years.  actor met Spalding Gray and learned more about the Performance Group. What I realized was missing is what most young American actors are missing when they begin the pilgrimage into a performing life-the ability to synthesize. Discipline and spontaneity, knowledge and instinct, technique and inspiration-how do you reach the place where these are integrated? A sudden insight: the BODY is the instrument. The crossroads exist within the body.

In performance, the actor’s body---alignment, shape, eye-focus, impulse, sound, gesture, relationship to one another, honest connection--tells the story. The words, the text, the sound/music, set design must be supported by the truth of the actor’s body in each moment on stage. Start with the body as a means of expression.

This is why training in “a physical approach to theatre” in an ensemble setting, needs to be required in all acting programs across the USA. I have worked to share this approach for the last 30 yrs within my own ensemble and with actors of all ages.

To some, it is a radical idea, but in my experience, it is the only way to put inspiration, honesty, and artistry back into American performance.